Vegas honcho calls the newly-engaged star "mollycoddled." Clooney says Wynn "needs to take off his red sparkly dinner jacket" and delivers other choice barbs in a statement released on Friday

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George Clooney is not pulling punches in his recent spat with Las Vegas casino mogul and Republican donor Steve Wynn.

Wynn and the Hollywood star reportedly first clashed in a war of words during a political argument earlier this month in Las Vegas after Wynn allegedly called President Barack Obama a dirty word. In an interview posted Friday on Bloomberg TV’s “Market Makers,” Wynn denied making the statement about Obama, said Clooney had been drinking and that Hollywood A-listers like him “live in a very strange bubble” and are “molly coddled”:

Artists, actors, people like that, they live in a very strange bubble of their own. They’re molly coddled, they’re highly privileged. We’re talking about successful artists like George, or Barbra Streisand or any other really successful performing artist. They live in a relatively small world. The people around them are very solicitous and caring for them. They have a world view that therefore everything should be given to everybody because everything has been given to them.

Wynn added that despite stars’ negative qualities, he and others in Las Vegas “love them anyway.”

“He was a little into the tequila,” Wynn said of Clooney during a reportedly heated exchange the two had recently during a group dinner. “But he is fun to be with. He’s a good storyteller.”

Clooney replied with a pointed statement of his own, which he released to Peopleon Friday:

He said I live in a bubble. More of a bubble than Las Vegas? Honestly? He says I’m ‘molly coddled,’ that I’m surrounded by people who coddle me. I would suggest that Mr. Wynn look to his left and right and find anyone in his sphere that says anything but ‘yes’ to him. Emphatically. I did not attend a private boys’ school, I worked in tobacco fields and in stock rooms, and construction sites. I’ve been broke more of my life than I have been successful, and I understand the meaning of being an employee and how difficult it is to make ends meet.

Steve is one of the richest men in the world and he should be congratulated for it, but he needs to take off his red sparkly dinner jacket and roll up his sleeves every once in a while and understand what most of the country is actually dealing with … or at least start with the fact that you can’t make up stories when eight people who are not on your payroll are sitting around you as witnesses.